My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(116)

Just, hopefully, without the slow, over-dramatic dying.

Either Cinnamon or Ginger is almost up onto the pier, though.

Which is when Jade’s Spidey-sense gets her head turning, her eyes zeroing in on… on… Theo Mondragon.

He’s bobbing in the water, using the baby announcement boat to see higher, and what he’s seeing is who everybody’s spotlighting for him: Shooting Glasses. Who’s supposed to be dead.

“No,” Jade says, but yes: in one of his bobs, or one of the water’s dips, the tip of Theo Mondragon’s Quint machete pokes up, is practically that long drill from The Slumber Party Massacre poster. And, on tonight of all nights, no one will take it seriously, everyone will think it’s a prop-weapon. There’s probably one that looks the same on every third boat, shit.

“There he is! ” Jade calls out, slapping the surface of the lake with her hand, which is when the first scream comes. She looks over like she has to, and cheerleaders are bailing off the back of the shark, falling one after the other like a choreographed dance number.

But why?

Jade clambers up onto Lonnie’s living room float again, using his floor lamp to steady herself, the lamp’s chain evidently caught in her grip enough to pull the lightbulb on.

Meaning there must be a battery on this raft somewhere—of course Lonnie would have a battery.

It lights her up, draws Theo’s glare to her.

“You,” he says, Jade somehow hearing it.

“Go to hell!” Jade screams back, and then tilts the lamp forward. It douses in the water, Lonnie lunging after it.

Jade steps back into the lake too, never mind the cold. She’s roiling with heat, now, has no choice but to keep Theo Mondragon occupied long enough for Shooting Glasses to climb to safety, long enough for the final girl to gather her wits, find herself, and— The cheerleaders, screaming again?

Jade whips her head around.

It’s… Jocelyn Cates? Proofrock’s beauty queen and onetime Olympic swimmer—the final girl hopeful of her day, surely.

Had there been a slasher in Proofrock twenty years ago. She’s standing up from her pink-frilled boat, and Jade’s blood, she’s pretty sure, actually drops a degree or two— all the degrees.

Jocelyn Cates is screaming because her husband beside her, whatever his name is, has black spreading over his chest. From his face, his mouth. Where his mouth used to be.

His lower jaw has been ripped off. All the flashlights within shining distance hold on him long enough that everyone can be sure. Long enough to track his slow slump forward.

Like that it’s panic at the disco.

The bass-boat bassinet fires up its outboard in response, breaking whatever promise this mom-and-dad-to-be had to make to Hardy. It stands up in the water and tries to spin around but there’s no room. Instead of executing a neat flipturn, the propeller wraps in the float beside it, the Henderson High float the teachers always do—the same “classroom” as every year—and all the teachers in the bolted-down chairs of their “desks” grab on to those desks, their hidden beers and glasses of wine exploding up before their faces, and, and— Among them, Jade sees the last person she ever thought she’d get to see again. All other sound falls away.

Mr. Holmes.

He’s there in a wheelchair, his right leg in a trash-bagged cast in front of him, a cigarette in his hand, hidden down by his spokes. And the float he’s on is being chewed into by an illegal propeller that’s screaming higher and madder, faster and faster.

“Sir! ” Jade shrieks, and doesn’t even think, just runs to him, climbing up and across Lonnie’s living room, falling almost immediately back into the water, conking her chin on the hard side of some boat, its mushy paper clinging to her face so she has to duck below the surface, swim under.

She comes up into absolute madness.

On-screen, the Orca is sinking, and right beside her, a much smaller Orca is too. The papier-maché shark is floating free, getting batted around, and—no. No no no.

The lower part of Jocelyn Cates’s husband’s face is snagged on a half-gone six-pack, is floating with it, right by Jade’s face.

What could even do that? An M-80 in the throat?

There’s no time, though.

Jade jerks away, trying to find Mr. Holmes. The bass-boat bassinet’s outboard is coughing down now, maybe has too much of the teachers’ float wrapped into its propeller. Jade can hear it, not see it. She looks around for anything to climb on, something to latch onto, and—the pier.

Either Cinnamon or Ginger has Galatea up on her hip.

They’re waiting for Shooting Glasses, who’s having to find his own way up, and with, Jade can see now, a line of nails angling down across his back. Theo Mondragon did get him.

Just, not enough.

Or: not yet.

Jade shakes her head no, can see this happening but do nothing about it: Theo Mondragon is gliding to the pier in—in Manx’s invisible canoe. Which he is using like a paddleboard, Letha. He even has an actual paddle.

Give him a robe, a wig, and he’s Stacey Graves.

And he must be soundless, too, or else his paddle dipping in is hidden by all the splashing around him, by Jaws still playing so loud through the speakers, by all the screaming. Shooting Glasses doesn’t hear him until it’s too late, anyway.

Theo Mondragon pulls him back hard, all at once, hard enough that the nails in Shooting Glasses’s back stab into Theo Mondragon’s chest and stomach, sending both of them spilling over the side, the invisible canoe continuing on invisibly, maybe, who knows.